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Integration of existing ontologies is an approach for reusing ontology elements in construction of a new ontology. Researchers have proposed various tools and methods for ontology merging; but very few of them work in an integrated manner with a comprehensive ontology construction methodology and also none of them support Persian language. In this paper, we proposed a systematic merge-based method for reusing ontology elements with Persian support in ontology construction. Proposed method built based on the design science research method. The process and algorithms of proposed method implemented and improved based on general cycle of design science method. Proposed method used to create a reference ontology for educational and research organizations in the subset of Iranian ministry of science, research and technology. Final product evaluated and verified by a gold standard. An ontology merge method based on reuse of ontology elements and a higher education ontology are main products of this research.

The goal of this research is to create a reference data model for educational and research institutes of Iranian Ministry of Sciences, Research, and Technology. After investigating existing technologies and considering the problem context, ontology was chosen as the data model format. In order to create the target ontology, an ontology construction methodology was designed and implemented. This methodology is created using design science research method and contains an architecture, a detailed workflow process, a guideline for performing 1each step, and related softwares in an integrated web-based system. The designed system is implemented in PHP and is available as open source. The system is used as the main tool to construct the target ontology. The proposed methodology leverages the three main knowledge sources including textual documents, existing ontologies in the higher education domain, and reverse engineering of a relational database of an integrated university system. The resulted product of this methodology was evaluated based on the data requirements of the Ministry of Sciences, Research, and Technology, and its shortcomings were resolved. The novelty of this work is both on the generated product, that is, a localized reference data model, and an ontology construction methodology.

While ontology development is beneficial, it is very costly and time consuming. In order to reduce this cost as well as increasing the accuracy and quality of ontology development, researchers have proposed different methodologies. The goal of these methodologies is to present a systematic manual or semi-automated development of ontologies, while each differs and has its strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, after reviewing current methodologies, we present a new integrated collaborative methodology for ontology development, and compare it with the existing ones. This new system, called Ontirandoc, has been used in two ontology development projects and its accuracy has been evaluated.